Accentuate the Regional

Given regional and urban studies increasingly tend to blend together, Soja’s article covers eight thematic fields which offer a critical and comparative perspective on regional/urban research.

1. The new regionalism emerged as part of the spatial turn and of the cross-disciplinary spread of critical spatial perspectives (p. 272). It was not widely covered by literature and was hardly studied empirically. In the past, regions were only considered as settings for economic activities and social processes, but nowadays, regions are seen as powerful drivers which are able to boost production, consumption and creativity on a local level and shape the globalisation of capital, work and culture (p. 273).
2. Urbanisation and regional development undeniably develop generating forces, e.g. in the field of economic development. However, to this day we have limited information on exactly how this clustering effect works, its negative impact and its consequences on the environment for example, or on climate change (p. 274).
3. Urban and regional concepts and shapes increasingly tend to blend, which Soja describes as a hybrid process of regional urbanisation. In metropolitan regions, regional urbanisation pushes the formerly rigid borders between urban and suburban, between urban and rural spaces and between towns and villages (ebd.). An example of this is the city-region of Los Angeles, which in the space of 60 years has become the most densely populated city-region of the United States, as evidenced by the peripheral urbanisation (40 cities of over one hundred thousand residents are located around LA) (p.275).
4. Polycentric urban area and regional cities are the main concepts of new regionalism; they have replaced older concepts such as the metropolis (ebd.). The metropolis is going through a paradigm shift which is in keeping with a regional urbanisation model. As part of this process, peri-urbanisation and the simultaneous increasing population density in city centres are gaining importance. These evolutions can be observed throughout the world, in cities and regions such as LA, San Francisco, London, Milan, Barcelona, Berlin, Johannesburg or even in the Greater Region between Luxembourg, Germany, France and Belgium (p. 276).
5. Cities and regions currently tend to become larger, and are referred to, among other things, as “megacity-regions” or “megalopolitan regions”. However, the most often used term is “city-region”. The term megacity refers to an urban region with over five million residents, whereas megaregions contain over twenty million residents (ebd.). A typical example of such a region is the Pearl River Delta in China, with cities such as Shenzhen, Guangzhou and Hong Kong and a total population of 120 million (p. 277).
6. Cities are increasingly subject to globalisation, and therefore cultural and economic structures are becoming increasingly heterogeneous and the concept of global urbanisation has emerged. Urbanisation exists on several scales, exceeding sub-national regional scales and often describing economic groupings of supranational regions such as NAFTA, MERCOSUR or ASEAN. In Europe in particular, new cross-border regions have also formed (ebd.). However, according to Soja, multi-scalar regionalisation cannot be solely limited to inter-state and economic processes, we must go beyond that (cf. global regional powers, North-South relations, mixing of subnational metropoles and regions) (p. 278).
7. With new regionalisations and urbanisations, the creation of new governance and planning structures has become indispensable. These structures should be flexible and focus on specific issues such as circulation or environment management. Examples of new forms of governance can be found in cities offering a shared management of their taxes in order to invest them in common regional and urban development projects (p. 279).
8. In addition to the development of new urban regions, research possibilities and questions pertaining to citizenship, democracy, equity, human rights and social movements are also developing. It can therefore be observed that the right to the city formulated by Lefebvre has been broadened to form a new claim, the right to the urban region. Regionalisation based on municipalities and on participatory democracy therefore produces particularly important research topics against the backdrop of the new regionalism (p. 280).